Very high Freedom already

Giving a voice to people, fostering collaboration and crowdsourcing between Customers, Partners and BMCers.

Moderators include Customers and Partners, illustration that no censorship happens (the Community is "for us all, by us all")

So how can we improve freedom?

Room for Improvement anyway

When we upgraded BMC Communities in March, we made much progress on the underlying platform (more social, more mobile), but did not touch yet all the rewards/points/badges. Gaps include the following:

To provide a great experience on all the Communities and Groups you're using, we actually had to hide the leaderboards in March. Points were calculated behind the scene (and rolled up to profile), but were not displayed in a given community or group.

As a consequence, BMCers (at least the BMC Communities team) were required to ID top users, making BMCers bottleneck (definitely not what we want on a community), thus slowing down how all people connect with each other in a meaningful fashion.

In the coming days, leaderboards will be back, fully public!

Announcing Reward Refresh

The update is actually way bigger than the leaderboards. The whole point/badges system will be refreshed.

What stays "as is"

What is improved

Points for your account

Badges that you have (except a couple that did not provide value, and will silently vanish)

Leaderboard on each community/group: easy way to quickly know who are the best contributors for a given topic

A way to display points that are made in each place (community or group): easy way to know specific skills for a given user

Levels are back. You'll quickly see how you (and others) level up.

Leaderboard Details

Many improvements in the leaderboards for sure!

First, they will appear again on all communities/groups

They will display Monthly datapoints (and not all time points)

great to ID trendy users,

it will avoid scaring new users (when somebody joins a community, and sees many people with tens of thousands of points, it's a bit frightening)

You'll have full access to user's profile when mousing over one of the leaders

Missions

On your profile, you'll have easy access to your points, and also badges you received (when completing a Mission)

Clear Descriptions of Missions (points, steps)

You will also have access to Missions you have not completed yet, showing ways you can benefit more from BMC Communities.

Note: life is full of surprises, so various rewards are not publicly documented, on purpose. They will just happen because you did something great for the Community.

What to expect? When?

Several changes will happen in the next days:

On Tuesday 7th, 6pm Pacific, we'll have a maintenance (a couple of hours, while most of us around the world are not using Communities) to prepare various activities. At this time, points and badges will disappear.

Some of these news are not fully validated, so please use caution when/if leveraging them.

First item is the new startup that 2 friends are busy with. Mission of this startup is to make sure that all developers respect quality and timing on all their projects. Apparently it's called "APL", I don't have more info yet (please share if you have some - any guess on the acronym?)

As shared in the Survey results post, we are planning many changes to improve even further your experience with BMC Communities.

Key themes we're focusing on in the short-term are:

reducing complexity: we already simplified many sub-communities within Products, we plan several simplification / enhanced navigation steps in the next weeks

more social: BMC Communities is where users connect with each other and engage. Various UX changes will be applied to make this far easier (explained below)

more actionable: so much content is posted here, let's make it easier to find, and take actions on (read below for details)

More Social

The User profile will allow to learn far more from each other (you'll spot things that you experience on social platforms like Linkedin, Google+, or Twitter for example).

Profiles will be simplified (more focused), yet more powerful.

Peer recognition on skills

You will be able to endorse each other on skills.

Even better, BMC Communities will then allow you to search people by skill.

Still on User profile, you'll be able to understand more connections from each others:

Quick view on number of following, and number of followers

Also displaying connections that you share with the profile you're displaying

Can you guess who's profile it is? (highly followed)

And that's not it! These 2 screenshots are only a couple of widgets within the profile.

User Profiles will also include:

Trends on content, communities and groups that you interact on

Featuring your top content

More visuals

And more!

Still on the social theme, the mobile app on Android comes back, with great capabilities:

rich text, ability to @mention people, but also content and communities/groups

ways to follow/unfollow content and people,

share, message, and more!

Quick access to profile attributes,

and ways to follow/unfollow, message, etc.

Heads-up: usernames (for example matt for me) will be simplified: you'll be prompted to update your username in case it currently includes an Email address (see rationale), or uses some capital letters.

Rich Text, @mention, insert picture, etc.

More actionable

We want crowdsourced content to be even more valuable for you all.

Greatly influence outcome on content

As you can easily guess, key capabilities include:

easier to search: what if final or official content bubbled up? And outdated content was rarely appearing in search (and would clearly be flagged as old, giving a pointer to the updated resource)

Easier to take action on: on most content, you'll be able to take actions (flag as to-do for yourself, and/or loop in others)

Comments from Beta Testers

"Profiles are looking nice! I have looked at a few and endorsed a few." Jason Miller

Tickets for BMC Engage

For everyone

Thank you again again for taking the survey! Do not worry if you didn't win something from this draw.

BMC Communities is constantly bustling with fun betas, hangoutsonair, local meetups andEvents. The Sorting Hat is always hovering over us. If you are an engaged Communities user, sharing and helping out, thou shalt not go unnoticed.

Let's make things bigger!

We want to go further and collect more experiences and thoughts from you all. It will help us to improve BMC Communities (User Interface, Content, Programs...) to better serve your needs in 2015 and later.

An announcement was posted yesterday about a survey.

In case you've missed it, let's make sure you all take 5 minutes to take this survey.

Topics we covered included: access to the right community (from web, mobile), interactions tips, Local User Groups, Beta Programs and more!

Interaction Use Cases

Users often think about a community as a "forum", to share issues in discussions, and hope to get answers.

As Brad McClave stressed, a community goes way further, with best practices shared by SMEs, and ideas posted/voted by community members to improve the Product (not even mentioning blogs that are shared periodically to send heads-up about a news, or propose a valuable topic to interact on.

Cris Coffey (Product Manager of Track-It!) went all the way to displaying Communities content directly in the UI of Track-It!, giving easy ways for users of the product to benefit and engage.

Could I use Google Authentication on BMC Communities? <= answer was that we cannot change authentication. Since Calvin currently uses login/password, using Google (or Facebook) would actually create another account, so he would have 2 identities on Communities (and all the posts, points and badges he got in the past would be tied to the first account). See more right here.

"The sub-saharan region is not yet very active, no Local User Group meetup yet." (and Anirban shared tips to make that happen, see below)

Local User Groups can actually happen, see what Kunal Sonawala did in Pune last week: this blog post eventually fostered a meetup (in Vyom Labs offices) for 40+ users, from Tata, Cognizant, Wipro, Atos and more! Such meetup

Last October, I spent four days in Orlando talking to many IT professionals that stopped by the BMC Social Media Hub at our Engage User Conference. We were giving away prizes to the attendees who tweeted photos of themselves wearing BMC sunglasses. The interest in our fun contest didn't surprise me, but the number of people who told us that they haven't used their Twitter account in a long time was unexpected. Watching people try to remember their Twitter password, load the app on their phone and/or send a tweet was a common occurrence at the Social Media Hub.

In my opinion, Twitter is the easiest social media channel to use and, unlike other channels, it lends itself to the merging of your personal and professional lives. Some people are intimidated (or irritated) by the constant stream of tweets, but once you learn a few Twitter tricks, it becomes a manageable and useful tool. Here are five suggestions to help you start using Twitter again.

1) Load the Twitter app on your phone. Having Twitter at your fingertips is one of the easiest ways to use it regularly. Check it in the morning to see the news that's trending, scroll through your Twitter feed when waiting in line to pick up your lunch and check out the hashtags being used while watching your favorite TV show. Once you start using Twitter daily, it becomes more interesting and valuable. I've learned about important breaking news stories on Twitter, long before they appeared on Google News.

2) Watch what's being talked about on Twitter. Instead of trying to figure out what to tweet about, spend some time reading your Twitter feed and see what other people are saying. Observing is a great way to learn about popular topics, see what's trending in your network and understand what makes an interesting tweet. Once you see something you want to talk about, retweet it or tweet a reply to the sender. The real time nature of Twitter makes it an easy place to jump in, connect and converse.

3) Favorite tweets. See the star under every tweet? That's how you favorite a tweet and it's a helpful tool. Use it to mark a tweet you'd like to come back to later, especially those with links to something you want to read. Your starred tweets are saved under "Favorites" in your Twitter profile and you can come back to them at any time. When you favorite a tweet, the sender sees this and it's a good way to acknowledge you read it and build connections on Twitter.

4) Be yourself. Twitter is sometimes called the never-ending cocktail party. The people at the Twitter party are your co-workers, family, friends, celebrities, athletes, politicians, customers and industry experts. Don't try to talk to everyone at the party or feel like you have to listen to every conversation. Choose who you interact with, be your smart, witty self, and have a good time. You'll end up "meeting" people you would never run into in your daily life and that's a great thing.

5) Use Buffer. Hands down, my favorite free social media tool is Buffer. Find it at bufferapp.com, connect it with your Twitter account and load the app on your phone. Buffer allows you to schedule up to ten tweets at a time for publishing on the days and times you select. As you find interesting articles online that you'd like to share, schedule them in Buffer. Have some cool photos on your phone that your followers might like? Don't tweet them all at once, but spread them out over a few days. Buffer is a fantastic way to be on Twitter all of the time without being on Twitter all of the time.

Once you start integrating Twitter into your day, it becomes a valuable way to stay informed and connected. There's a fascinating worldwide party going on out there and you don't want to miss it!

Have Twitter tips you would like to share? Please comment below. Follow me @alisonmunn for more social media tips and industry conversation.

This pioneering school project aims at serving the deserving visually challenged girls belonging to rural areas. We also have to our credit a Braille book production center in Pune, a Braille transcription unit at Mumbai and a vocational training center at Nasik and Aurangabad. Moreover, we also have a scholarship scheme which provides financial assistance to deserving students